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Comment by semihsalihoglu | Hacker News Reader

I am also amused that Ontario, which is the most populous province has the following statistics: Area: 1,076,395 km square Population: 15.3M

Istanbul, which is the biggest city in my home country Turkiye has these: Area: 5,343 (so 200x smaller) Population: 18M (official census is ~16M but even the major cites 18M)

I'm not even comparing the much denser places in the world (e.g., Gaza).

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The provincial area figure is meaningless for computing density. It’s like calculating the density of beer in a glass that’s been poured with 99% head. The real density is in the quarter inch of beer at the bottom of the glass, not the giant blob of foam above it.

Found the Canadian.

I’ve heard beer is actually pretty pricey in Canada

We (famously) had a politician campaign on “bringing back Buck-a-beer.” I never drank that swill though!

I heard Labatt Blue is not great.

Labatt Blue is a bit like Budweiser (it has 5% alcohol though), but like in the US, there are smaller breweries that make much better beers.

Thanks to the Liquid Cash Barrons of Ontario.

I believe those liquid cash barons are now all international conglomerates. Also, I can tell you that the LCBO is actually quite a bit cheaper than BC Liquor and NSLC. Though compared to Alberta it is way more expensive.

Ontario is culturally 2 provinces, southern and northern Ontario.

The north is what you normally think of Canada: rocks, trees and lakes. The south is similar to the neighbouring US states of Michigan, Ohio, and New York but with a distinct Canadian identity and a French region in the east.

Most of the population (13.4M) lives in the southern part (114,000 km^2)

Still a bit too general.

Southwestern Ontario (Windsor/London) is very culturally and demographically different from Toronto/Golden Horseshoe and Eastern Ontario (Ottawa/Kingston)

Michigan is also culturally different from New York.

The north-south split is the most striking, but yes south can be further divided into the GTA, SW (farm country and a small part of the rust belt, similar to the Midwest) and eastern (Ottawa and the townships: government and farms)

Michigan and Ohio are most similar to SW but upstate NY also bleeds culturally into the region, both around Niagara and the thousand islands.

North-South seems like an arbitrary reduction of Ontario culture.

I don't know that someone Thunder Bay/Sault Ste Marie is that culturally different from Barrie/Sarnia. Windsor to Ottawa is very different.

That 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border seems minimally related to culture differences and more geographic/economic.

It's worth noting that roughly half of Canada's population lives in the Quebec-Windsor Corridor [0] (the land between Quebec City, QC and Windsor, ON). This region is really the Canadian equivalent of the Boston-Washington corridor in the States, so imagine if nearly 150 million lived in BosWash.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Co...

You just compared apples to oranges.

~6.954 (as of 2016 so actually higher) million of those 15m people live in 8,244 km^2 in the Greater Toronto Hamilton area, which works out to 843 people per square kilometer (vs 3368 for Istanbul).

Yes, 1/4 the density, yes, but nowhere close to the bizarre comparison you gave, where you used literally uninhabitable/barely-settled areas of the province (Ontario is huge and mostly rock and lakes) and compared to one of the densest cities in the world. At least compare urban area to urban area.

Toronto is the 3rd or 4th most populated city in North America, depending on how you count. Not some quaint arctic getaway. Also sits at the same latitude as e.g. Marseille in the south of France, or Florence in Italy. So not exactly northern at all.

Also if we restrict to just the actual technical city of Toronto proper, the density is higher than what you gave for Istanbul: 2,794,356 people in 630.20km^2 == 4435 people per square kilometer.

So... Check your biases at the door.

I might be wrong in the numbers as I just got them from Wikipedia. But to be clear: Istanbul is the name of both the city and the "province" in Turkiye. And I used the larger area number from Wikipedia, which is for the province: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul

So even when using official numbers, the urban density of Istnabul is > 6000 according to Wikipedia.

ps: I live in Toronto, so I know Toronto is incomparably dense compared to other parts of Ontario. I could have made the same point by comparing Toronto's density to Ontario. Though, I'm curious how much of Ontario is uninhabitable. I thought most of it (say > 50%) seemed habitable.

The right comparison would be with the area and population of southern & maybe eastern Ontario and use that. Northern Ontario is really just something else. Anything north of the line where the Canadian shield begins becomes basically unarable and extremely low population density. And once you get past e.g. Timmins, there's really ... "nothing." (Pretty though.)

I don't have the patience to go look this up, but obv it will clearly be below Istanbul, but likely about equivalent with most of the US atlantic region and maybe even parts of the UK etc.

Istanbul/Constantinople, ... a heavily populated city for like 2000 years, not to mention the region going back to the, uh, paleolithic and it's literally basically the origin of ... farming and settled agriculture. Kinda weird comparison.

> maybe eastern Ontario

What do you mean by "maybe"? Eastern Ontario contains the 4th largest metropolitan area in Canada (Ottawa) which is a very reasonable comparator, the density is 195/km.

IT's just there are large parts of what is classified as "eastern Ontario" that is kinda similar to the near-north ; not arable, shield & cottage country, and sparsely populated. So it doesn't feel fair. But yes, Ottawa clearly a major centre.

Yet we have massive housing issues...

Name me a major western metro area with jobs and a good standard of living that doesn't. I remember people banging the drums 10 years agho "come to Berlin, there's so much empty houses". Yeah, that changed quickly.

This is a good point. There must be one though that other cities can look up to. I would guess Singapore does a good job on these problems. I would be curious to hear of the best examples of large cities that have done a better job on housing.

Housing problems here are related to pricing, and only tangentially to quantity of construction. The issue is how cheap housing loans have been, how deregulated the real estate sales market, and how stupid the last 20 years of governments have been about a) how they regulate the housing market and b) what kind of housing gets built (mostly either sprawly suburban single family mc-homes way out in e.g. Vaughan or Mississauga etc. or tiny condos in Toronto proper which just get turned into speculative investments or airbnbs).

Mortgages here were too cheap for too long. Really, what people "buy" when they buy a home is a mortgage, not a house.

Chicago

Because the government is importing a massive number of people relative to the country’s population and not building anywhere near enough housing. They ain’t slowing down any time soon so it’s gonna get even worse.

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